Zipped up in Shackleton’s sleeping bag
Teenage Oliver Sutherland was chasing penguins when he almost rode an ice floe into the vast Antarctic Ocean.
The year was 1962 and the 19-year-old zoology student lived in Ernest Shackleton’s Hut, spending nights wrapped in the great explorer’s own sleeping bag because his own wasn’t up to scratch. ‘‘People would be horrified to know I did that because the whole place is a museum these days,’’ he said.
What few New Zealanders know is that the self-effacing Kiwi’s life-anddeath adventure became the inspiration for a Hollywood movie starring John Hurt.
Now 73, Sullivan this weekend recounted his three months on the White Continent to commemorate the centenary of Shackleton’s expedition and the ‘‘heroic era’’ of Antarctic exploration.
He was one of the last to live in the hut before it was sealed up, and described it as ‘‘frozen in time’’.
‘‘It was extraordinary. . . looked exactly how it did in 1917,’’ he said. ‘‘There were uneaten scones on the table and bacon in a pan.’’
Sutherland was there studying the breeding patterns of penguins and the effect of humans on a colony.
He would get up to 40 visitors a day from people on expeditions to see the penguins. ‘‘What they found was me. ‘‘I was an object of interest as well because I was there by myself.’’
One of his visitors – journalist Graham Billing – wrote a novel about Sutherland entitled Forbrush and the Penguins, about a biologist studying the life of penguins in the Antarctic. It was published in 1965.
In 1971 the book was adapted into a feature film, Cry of the Penguin, starring John Hurt.
One of Sutherland’s most vivid memories from his time at the bottom of the world was cheating death on an ice floe with a dog handler from Scott Base.
The pair had ventured to the edge of the ice to watch the penguins diving into the sea.
‘‘We were out there for a while and when we turned around to go back, we found we were on an ice floe and a big gap had opened up and we were slowly drifting up McMurdo Sound,’’ he said.
‘‘We rushed down the ice and found just one gap which was near enough to jump across – we jumped back and lived to tell the story.
‘‘Later that night we looked at that ice floe as it was heading off towards the horizon.
‘‘I don’t know if we would have ever been found.’’
The End of the Heroic Era of Antarctic Exploration was a conference held at Auckland’s Torpedo Bay Navy Museum on Saturday, commemorate the conclusion of Shackleton’s Antarctica sojourn in 1917.